S2C: The Next Evolution of E-commerce Beyond B2C, C2C, and O2O

S2C, or Service to Consumption, refers to leveraging internet services to guide users toward purchasing products. Simply put, it involves utilizing digital tools to understand user needs and deliver high-quality services, thereby encouraging product consumption (excerpted from the views of Bao Hu, founder of Wei Nutrition).

The services provided by MicroNutrition represent an upgrade to the traditional B2C, C2C, and O2O models of delivering products and services to users, namely the S2C (Supplier-to-Consumer) service model. This is likely what entrepreneurs, consumers, and merchants in this sector have long been pursuing. The author believes that the S2C healthy lifestyle service model exemplified by MicroNutrition is neither a mere innovation nor a fleeting, gimmicky trend. Instead, the changes brought about by this health service model will directly benefit four key user groups: first, consumers pursuing healthy diets; second, offline businesses in catering, fresh produce, and nutritional supplements; third, office workers with prominent sub-health issues; and fourth, healthcare institutions specializing in health management.

Category 1: Consumers Pursuing Healthy Diets

Although users’ health awareness is growing stronger and they possess a certain economic foundation to pursue a healthy lifestyle, differences in region, age, time period, health characteristics, and economic conditions have led to increasingly diverse preferences and consumption concepts. These are precisely the diversified needs that traditional platforms and merchants are currently unable to address. Demand constitutes the market; this means that only by meeting these demands can businesses win over users.

Currently, mainstream diet and health management platforms in the market have launched a variety of products and services. However, homogenization is becoming increasingly severe, with most platforms relying on price reductions to attract users while rarely considering their actual needs. In contrast, the rise of food and health service products under the S2C model is specifically aimed at meeting users’ genuine needs.

Real-time acquisition of food nutrition and calorie information via smartphone cameras, along with providing alerts, is an excellent example of meeting users’ health needs. Several products offering this functionality are already available on the market. In addition to Wei Yingyang mentioned in the article, there are SRI’s Ceres project (calorie recognition) and Meal Snap (calorie recognition). These features enable users to instantly determine whether their nutritional and caloric intake exceeds recommended limits or remains within a reasonable range. Furthermore, by quantifying their dietary records and referencing national nutritional standards, users can clearly understand their daily intake levels—how much they have consumed, how much they are lacking, and by how much they have exceeded recommendations—thereby empowering them to autonomously manage their own health. Examples include Ledongli Life Health & Fitness for general wellness tracking and Cuptime for monitoring hydration health. Leveraging mobile intelligent software allows users to effectively manage and stay informed about their overall health and sub-health status in daily life, essentially providing each user with a free, personal health management consultant. This is clearly beneficial for consumers pursuing healthy dietary habits, as it satisfies demands for convenience, real-time feedback, cost-effectiveness, and personalized service.

Category II: Merchants Eager to Promote Their Products and Services to Users

Based on users' own data, determine their individual nutritional and caloric intake requirements, and then provide further dietary health services. This service is implemented by offering personalized, free recommendations for suitable offline gourmet foods, fresh produce, and nutritional supplements.

Current merchant offerings are of high quality and diverse, with a growing emphasis on health-oriented product services. However, merchants often struggle to effectively market these products to the right customers. With technological advancements and refinements, as mentioned above, leveraging mobile health applications to provide personalized healthy dining solutions can help merchants more easily earn consumer trust and capture market share. It is believed that an increasing number of health service platforms will empower merchants to better promote their quality products to users.

However, some merchants may argue that this would be cumbersome. For now, let me outline the benefits of leveraging such platforms:

First, the rise in consumer health awareness has led to strong demand for health-related products and services.As living pressures mount and disposable incomes rise, consumers are increasingly prioritizing quality and personalization in their spending, seeking diverse flavors while emphasizing healthy and balanced dietary choices. This trend presents a significant opportunity for merchants: by meeting these consumer needs, businesses can secure strong product demand and avoid engaging in price wars for an extended period. Furthermore, it becomes easier to build robust relationships with customers; when merchants fulfill user requirements, satisfied customers may voluntarily promote the brand and follow its updates, thereby becoming loyal advocates. Currently, mainstream food service platforms primarily rely on price competition to attract users, largely neglecting individualized healthy dining needs. Consequently, the diverse demands of consumers remain unmet.

Second, Precision MarketingIf you, as a merchant, are located near users and offer products or services that suit their needs, the platform will automatically recommend your business to them. This represents an excellent opportunity for free advertising. High-quality offerings from merchants should not only deliver delicious flavors through carefully blended ingredients but also align with users’ individual needs for healthy and balanced consumption. This reflects consumers’ genuine pursuit of health and addresses a key challenge facing merchants—provided they are sincerely committed to growth. The platform drives traffic to your business at no cost, ensuring consumers know your location, how to reach you, and how to get in touch. Compared to pure price wars, this precision marketing approach holds greater significance, as merchants can focus on refining their products and services without worrying about sales channels.

3. Future TrendsIt is crucial to recognize that, beyond social needs, health requirements are of paramount importance. Diet and health are inextricably linked, and integrating dietary management with health care represents an inevitable trend. Merchants must prioritize and cater to users’ personalized demands for dietary and health-related consumption. Apple’s promotion of its Health features aims to capture user health data in the foreseeable future, thereby enabling the provision of value-added services.

Category 3: Users with Prominent Sub-health Issues

Everyone’s nutritional intake (including in cases of suboptimal health) can be quantified. While consumers may understand this concept, they often struggle to maintain such tracking consistently in daily life. A digital platform can automatically calculate the nutritional content of each meal, indicating how much more or less is needed for the day. Such a service is a boon for individuals with suboptimal health. Users simply record their meals without manual calculations or guesswork; by following the platform’s recommended food options, they can create balanced and healthy dietary combinations effortlessly. This represents a simple yet impactful shift toward healthier living. In my view, this service marks a qualitative leap in suboptimal health management, offering personalized, one-on-one user support that provides timely health warnings to those severely affected. Since self-discipline is often a challenge for this population, high-quality services will inevitably attract their attention. Moreover, free and personalized services are universally appealing.

Category 4: Health Service Management Enterprises and Institutions

In the future, health management service platforms can achieve connectivity with hospitals and other health service institutions. Through the platform, these institutions can track users’ lifestyle data, such as dietary health, in real time, enabling early identification of potential health risks. By integrating this insights with their own services, they can provide real-time solutions, ensuring that emerging issues are addressed promptly.

Imagine a day when an expert can help you track the health issues of you and your family online via the Internet, providing early warning services, online consultation and communication services, etc. At that time, you may only need to pay a small consulting fee (because one expert can serve dozens or even hundreds of users online) to enjoy your own private health consultant service. Meanwhile, the service efficiency and income of health experts will be greatly improved to some extent. In this way, in the future, you will only go to the hospital for treatment, and you will no longer need to queue up at the hospital for registration due to some simple diagnostic issues....

What Is the Future of S2C?

First, capture high-quality user "data"

Take health as an example: Illness often enters through the mouth, with 90% of diseases attributed to unreasonable dietary habits. In the future, when users intend to focus on healthy eating or related consumption, they will first think of a specific type of health service platform to check their personal health records, thereby embarking on their journey toward a healthier lifestyle from this platform entry point. At this stage, the generation, collection, and processing of user data will become easier and more efficient. Similarly, the advertisements recently launched by WeChat are also based on user data within the WeChat ecosystem, capturing multi-dimensional daily data such as social circles, payment transactions, communication records, and purchasing behaviors to target users with relevant ads.

Second, guide offline consumption based on user data

1. Precision Marketing

Part of the discussion in the article has already illustrated this point: by understanding users’ relevant data and analyzing their needs, we can further achieve precise matching between these needs and merchants’ products and services.

2. S2C Services

Reposting an example:

Today, a customer dined at a restaurant. After placing the order, the server brought out the dishes and said, “Our nutritional meal-planning chef noticed via the backend terminal that you should not consume excessive calories. Therefore, we used less oil in this dish and appropriately increased the proportion of low-calorie ingredients. Additionally, based on a comparison between your nutritional and caloric intake from breakfast and lunch and your recommended daily requirements, the chef added approximately 30 grams of chicken to this dish to meet your protein needs for the day. Thank you!”

This is a typical example of the S2C services that catering merchants will need to provide to users in the O2O model; you can also apply this scenario to B2C and C2C models. The integration of software with merchants enables them to gain insights from the platform into their own customers’ needs, demand trends among nearby consumers, competitors’ product marketing strategies, and more. Leveraging this information, merchants can deliver personalized services and anticipate user needs. Merchants can thereby enhance theirEfficiency of corporate operational decision-making management, product and service innovation systems, member information management systems, etc.

Amid intensifying homogenization and weak product and service offerings, various types of merchants—such as fresh food markets, health service providers, and manufacturers and distributors of health-enhancing products—are facing the challenge of marketing their products and services to the right consumers. For these merchants, isn’t it well worth spending a modest amount to attract a substantial user base?

Third, is “data” gradually establishing its advantage?

Many products today compete in the market through price wars, from the user's perspective, they will choose whichever is cheaper. Life data is a different concept; it represents a process. This means that as a user, whether your life data is reasonable or not will ultimately reflect on your needs. Users are unlikely to record data offline just for the sake of recording. The same data, recorded at different times, would not be willingly entered by a user across two or more platforms—this differs from choosing products based on price. For platforms, capturing a user’s data signifies having a significant advantage in market competition. A user is unlikely to easily abandon their long-term accumulated life data on one platform because this data reflects their lifestyle needs and conditions.

It is foreseeable that whichever company masters high-quality user data will be better positioned to transform such data into commercialized products and win the market.

Fourth, Let “Payment” Come with Greater Force

The essence of this world is "transaction.". In today’s internet era, “transactions” have become more convenient, seamless, and secure. As our world continues to evolve, individuals’ latent needs are being further uncovered, and diverse payment systems will be increasingly refined (e.g., Alipay, WeChat Pay, membership cards, points redemption, and credit-based consumption).

S2C Services Provide Consumers with Stronger Rationale for PaymentUsers can measure, track, and provide feedback on the service effectiveness of merchants. Compared to the product service models of traditional e-commerce platforms (such as group buying), S2C is far less likely to engage in price wars. The prices accepted by consumers are reasonable for merchants and do not come at the expense of service quality. By leveraging data beyond mere payment transactions, merchants can make users feel actively cared for and attended to, thereby meeting their personalized needs and creating new value. This enables users to perceive these personalized services as more valuable than traditional discounts.

Fifth, Service = “One Kilometer”

By anticipating customer needs in advance, merchants can provide personalized services, establish strong and sincere service relationships, and deliver tailored solutions over the long term, ensuring that the right products and services reach customers at the appropriate time.

If merchants can anticipate users’ daily dietary and health needs in advance and establish customized, long-term service relationships with them, they can provide a diverse array of tasty, healthy meals tailored to each user’s daily requirements. By delivering these appropriate healthy meals to users or their family members at the optimal time, merchants can significantly enhance the timeliness and quality of their delivery services.

Pre-demand analysis enables proactive service delivery, effectively resolving the “last mile” challenge in logistics and distribution.。Moreover, I personally believe that to truly resolve the "last mile" challenge, it is essential to bring services closer to the end user.

Sixth, S2C services are the future

The S2C model aims to teach you how to better deliver your products and services to the users who need them.In today’s internet era, driven by technological innovations and upgrades in big data and smart devices, merchants can more readily gain insights into user needs, tailor their products and services accordingly, and enable users to meet their own demands through these offerings.

As a buyer’s market gradually takes shape, traditional seller’s-market tactics for promoting products and services are encountering increasing difficulties in today’s internet era.The S2C service model truly brings the principle of “the customer is king” to life by meeting users’ personalized needs, thereby enabling merchants to create genuine value.。

Make a small prediction:

1. A buyer’s market has taken shape; the most effective approach for merchants to promote their products and services is to start by analyzing users’ actual needs and follow through consistently.

2. Consumers are increasingly aware of their own needs, creating prime opportunities for generating raw user data; industry giants will strive to align with this trend, which will become particularly evident in 2015.

3. It is likely that in another decade or so, e-commerce will fade into the background as consumers take it for granted, much like electricity and water today. Concepts such as B2C, C2C, and O2O, which emerged alongside e-commerce, will become less prominent, as they are merely synonyms for transaction models involving simple changes in participants and scenarios. As development progresses, meeting users’ personalized needs becomes inevitable. The rise of the service-based economy will require these traditional models to address S2C (Service-to-Consumer) service challenges. The future belongs to S2C services; you need only specify what S2C service you provide, which includes payment and logistics.

[Note: This article is a contribution to VCBeat by Sanmu. Author: Sanmu (pen name), a humble junior reporter and digital health observer.]

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not represent the position of VCBeat.